Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Location-aware and/or context-aware “wearable” devices may be configured to provide an augmented-reality experience for users as they go about various aspects of everyday life. These devices may be configured to sense and analyze a user's environment, and to intelligently provide information appropriate to the physical world as the user experiences it. Such wearable devices may sense a user's surroundings by determining a user's geographic location, detecting objects within the user's field of vision, and detecting what a user is hearing, and/or by carrying out one or more other examples. Further, wearable devices may be able to detect one or more aspects of the user's own physical state. The information collected by the wearable devices may then be analyzed in order to determine what—if any—information to present to the user.
Many wearable devices include or take the form of a head-mounted display (HMD) that is worn by the user. An HMD typically provides a heads-up display near the user's eyes. As such, HMDs may also be referred to as “near-eye” displays. HMDs typically overlay computer-generated graphics (e.g., text, images, and/or video, etc.) onto the user's perception of the physical world. HMDs may include some form of display that renders graphics in front of one or both of the user's eyes in a manner that causes the user to perceive the computer-generated graphics and the physical world simultaneously. HMDs that include displays in front of both of the user's eyes are often referred to as “binocular” HMDs, while those that include a display in front of just one eye are often referred to as “monocular” HMDs.
HMDs may integrate computer-generated graphics in the user's view of the physical world using a number of techniques. For example, “see-through” HMDs typically display graphics on a transparent surface so that the user sees the physical world while essentially looking through the overlaid graphics. As another example, “see-around” HMDs typically overlay a display on the physical world by placing the display close to the user's eye in order to take advantage of the “sharing” of vision between a user's eyes, and create the effect of the display accompanying the view of the world seen as by the user.
An HMD may include a “point-of-view” video camera aligned with the user's frame of reference and mounted on the wearable device, so as to track movement of the user's head. Because it effectively captures what the user is seeing at a given point in time, this video can be analyzed to detect objects and/or people within the user's view, to identify these objects and/or people, and to display information via the wearable device that corresponds to these objects and/or people. Furthermore, analysis of the video may be used to determine where a given object or person is located in the user's frame of reference, and to display corresponding information in the wearable device such that the user sees the corresponding information as “floating” over or near the given object or person.
As an example, when a user is looking at a friend, a video camera on the user's HMD may capture video of the friend. The video can then be analyzed using, for example, facial-recognition techniques. As such, the HMD may identify the friend, and may accordingly display information related to the friend such that the user sees the information appear to the user to be proximate their friend. For example, the HMD may display the friend's name, contact information, birthday, etc.